Project Cyclops, A Design... - Department of Earth and Planetary ...

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CIVILIZATION, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY
Some few thousand years ago, cultural evolution was
accelerated by the development of new methods of
controlling the environment. Today we might refer to
these changes as "technological breakthroughs." The
catalog reads: the discovery of metals (the Iron and
Bronze ages), the development of agriculture, house
building, transportation by horse and boat, the discovery
of the wheel, weaving, and the improvements in clothing.
Along with these technical changes there developed
an ultimately more powerful human capability, which
was in turn to permit further technological sophistication.
The new achievement was the use of symbols, which
can be viewed as an external manifestation of the
internal model of the world now developing so rapidly.
The symbols were those of writing and measurement,
and they permitted more complete communication and
planning. Early sign writing evolved into the alphabets.
Numbers could be written down, communicated, and
preserved, and the precision of the manufacture of tools,
buildings, vehicles, and other devices were improved by
measurement.
The rapid cultural evolution at the beginning of
recorded history brought a much greater control of the
environment and utilization of its resources. It became
possible for larger populations to support themselves in
relative stability. Instead of living in small groups,
human societies began to congregate in large cities, and
the early civilizations evolved in the Middle East, China,
India, the Mediterranean, and in Central America. The
process has continued to the present day and has been
accelerated, particularly since the Renaissance, by the
growth of modern science and technology.
In these few paragraphs it is not possible to review
the development of science and technology in any detail.
It is, however, important to single out some of the
landmarks, and to describe their influence on the
behavior
of society.
Some gains in the understanding of natural processes
were achieved by the ancient Egyptians, and during the
classical age of Greece. For the most part these were
limited to macroscopic events that could be seen and
measured with simple instruments. Some predictions
could be made of major astronomical events, and
mathematical proofs were found for geometrical problems.
The Greek philosophers struggled to find logical
explanations for natural phenomena, including human
behavior. While their conclusions were often wrong
because of false premises, their methods of logical
argument, together with the increasing respect for the
power of analysis, foreshadowed the growth of the
scientific method in Europe after the Dark Ages.
Post-renaissance inventions such as the telescope and
microscope extended the range of man's senses and
brought increased and more quantitative understanding
of the world. The invention of printing made the
communication of ideas comparatively simple. Improvements
in agriculture, shipping, and manufacture,
together with colonization and trade, led to an increased
wealth so that is was possible for a few gifted individuals
to devote time to the construction of theories and to the
development of experimental techniques. Scientific
societies were formed, and the scientific method was
established. Biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics
progressed rapidly. Basic laws governing the
behavior of matter and energy were discovered and
refined. In their wake, and demonstrating their power,
came the major technological advances that in turn,
permitted a more precise control of the environment and
an expanding population. Energy from steam, petroleum,
and the atom became available, and made possible
large-scale engineering projects.
This fragmentary chronicle describes the results of
recent advances in the precision of the internal model of
the external world. The modern computer represents an
extension of such internals models, and is now capable
of carrying out calculations necessary for a more
complete description of the external world at speeds far
in excess of those that could ever be achieved by the
human brain in its present form. We begin to talk of
artificial intelligence and of processes of machine computation
that are coming to have some of the characteristics
of human thinking. The boundary between the
living and the nonliving (machines) is becoming less clear
in any absolute terms, in the same way that the
boundary between the first cell and its complex biochemical
precursors is a little vague.
The capability to control and use resources has
permitted the organization of modern society into larger
and larger groups. The amount of localized decreased
entropy in this corner of the solar system continues to
increase. Life is flourishing as never before on the planet
Earth.
We are concerned in this study particularly with the
rapid growth in the recent understanding of the physical
universe. The description of the evolution of galaxies,
stars, and planetary systems found earlier in this chapter
testifies to this knowledge. The description of the
evolution of life on this planet, now fairly complete,
forces us to ask whether living systems on the planets of
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